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Kiss Me

November 03, 2018

Intimacy takes on many forms, but of all the ways people display affection for one another, kissing has the most transformative power. Kisses can be sweet; kisses can be playful; they can be ice-breakingly exciting. But kissing can also reveal truths between two—or more—people and act as a catalyst for everything from passion to relationship drama.

Model and Film Hooligans founder Lida Fox explores these aspects of the humble smooch through a curated collection of personal photographs and writing in her new book, Kiss Me. The book brings viewers into bedrooms, house parties, and crowded cafes as people are photographed in the midst of genuine affection and PDA melodrama.

Last week, Fox stopped by the office Newsstand to drop off some copies of the book and tell us all about it. Read our interview with the photographer below, and don’t forget to stop by the Newsstand to get your own copy.

Tell me a bit about why you made the book. Like, what prompted the topic of kissing?

It was just something that I noticed a lot of people were taking photos of or had in their personal collection of photos. It was also around the time when a lot of people were breaking up, kind of at the end of last year. It seemed like everyone had these six year relationships ending—like, everyone was like, ‘I can’t take this anymore.’ So many people I know broke up, and I also broke up with my boyfriend. I mean, I didn’t break up with him, we just broke up. So, for the writing in the book, I asked people to send in their ideas on relationships or their ideas on love—and this was all happening before the time when everyone was breaking up. The book started before that happened. But then it was all coming together while that was happening so I was like, ‘Oh shit.’

That made it interesting to read everyone’s perspectives and they were all really personal. Even when they were funny, they were generally pretty sad—regarding love and how it affects people. A lot of people were really insecure about their writing too. But I just connected the writing with all of the photos. Sometimes the people writing the pieces weren’t the photographers who shot the photos, but there was something overlapping with the themes—laughing or tackling someone or spitting in someone’s face. And then the writing would be about like, ‘licking the sweat off of them.’ So, it all overlapped well and came together really nicely.

There’s a lot of different photographers in the book. How was the process of editing all those different artists’ work into a single book?

It took a long time! And I put it together with my friend Aida [Nizankovska], who I do Film Hooligans with. We asked people to send in their photos—some people only sent in a few, so that was easy to just be like, ‘Okay if you sent three then they’re all in.’ But other people sent in like fifteen or twenty photographs and it was like, ‘Okay, let's go through them and see which ones work best.’ So, it took a little over a year.

What were you looking for in the photos that you chose?

I wanted to have the work encompass a lot of different feelings of love. Some of the pictures are really tender, there’re people who are having sex, there’s a photo of a mouth kissing through Skype—which is relatable. There are also people who are not enjoying the kisses, they’re like, ‘Ugh, get away from me, don’t kiss me.’ I wanted to bring a lot of different perspectives together.

Talk to me a bit about Film Hooligans. What is it?

Film Hooligans also started as just an idea to showcase people’s film diaries, because so many people take film photos. For Instagram things are always really edited—it shows the ideal of someone’s life and it’s usually a way people are trying to come across. A lot of people still take film photos and they are so excited about them, but then they just keep them to themselves—which is awesome, that’s the point of taking them. But I started taking photos to remember things that were happening in my life that I would forget. Because I do actually go back and look at film photos more than scroll through the old photos in my phone—though I do that, too. But so many people have these diaries laying around, and sometimes you sit down with friends and share them, but not always. So, we just wanted a place for people to submit their photos, then we put them up, and it’s public so anyone can see them and enjoy these photos that are really beautiful, or funny, or show an interesting perspective on life.

There’s a serious magic in the film process—I think it’s got something to do with the fact that you’re working with chemistry, as opposed to pixels or other methods.

You also can’t see the photo immediately after you’ve taken it. With phone photos, people are often like, ‘Oh let’s see!’ or ‘Fix this, fix that—let’s look like this now,’ or people get really staged. That happens in film photos, as well, but I try to get shots that people aren’t expecting—that they don’t realize I’m taking. Just capturing moments—what’s really going on.

How many people are involved with Film Hooligans?

It’s a lot, and it’s always growing. It used to just be close friends, but more and more people have been submitting rolls, so we’ve been able to expand and have more and more types of people involved. I find it interesting because it shows people’s lives—people who are photographers, people who are into music, fashion, or who are artists. These aren’t the perspectives that everyone has in the country, but sometimes I’ll get emails where people are like, ‘Oh this made me pull out my old film camera that I used to use,’ and that’s really exciting.

What made you want to turn Kiss Me into a book as opposed to a section on the Film Hooligans site?

Aida and I have always wanted to do print. It seems like a contradiction sometimes because we run a film website—like an anti-digital space, but our platform is digital. So, we’ve always wanted to have some things in print as a memento. There was one zine we did before this that didn't really have a concept—it was just a mashup of photos and drawings that people sent. So, this was the first one that we had a concept for and actually released.

Do you think people will interact with the work in a unique way because it’s printed, as opposed to what it would be if it were just on the site, where people would view it on their laptop or phone?

I think so—I mean, I hope so. People come into bookstores and connect with work in a way that's totally different from the internet. Plus, they can take it home and look back at it later—I think that makes it more meaningful than just seeing it on screen.

I know you said you were going through a breakup part way through completing the book. Where did making the book put you emotionally?

It was interesting because some of the writing in the book was mine, but it was older, so not all of it was directly about things that were happening in my life at the time—but some of it was. I find that my writing can be vague and interpreted in different ways, but some of it did have to do with my relationship at the time, and my ex-boyfriend also has one piece of writing in the book, as well. It says, ‘Two lips crash landing, neither one left standing,’ and I decided to include it. Then we broke up.

Did you ever want to stop working on the book because you were going through that breakup?

Not really, because I’d been working on it for such a long time and I was really excited with how it was coming together. So, I never really thought about stopping it. Also, there were other old relationships in the book. Marcel [Castenmiller], for instance, sent me photos that include past girlfriends. Luckily, people seem to be chill about moving on.

Have you ever had an unforgettable kiss?

I mean, most of my kisses—not all—but a lot of them have been really meaningful. I’ve always loved kissing—I’m all for it.

My favorite piece from the book is on page 49. It says, ‘Love may be imagined. But the outcomes that it brings are real. If it’s ever screwed you over, at least it taught you how to feel.’ Have you ever experienced a love that didn’t go as planned?

That one’s mine! And it was probably about the relationship I was in before the last one, though it’s relevant to both of them. I feel like when I sense things are going bad, I often do something to make the other person mad and screw things up, which is kind of what another one of my pieces in the book is about. It’s so stupid, and I’m trying not to do shit like that ever again, but I definitely have done things like that, where I’m like, ‘I don’t think you love me, I’m going to kiss this other person in front of you.’ And sometimes, that ends a relationship and you're like, ‘Oh, yeah, that kind of backfired. I guess I deserve it.’

I feel like kissing is less intense than sex, but in a lot of ways, almost more intimate.

Yeah, completely. I find it, in many ways, the most intimate thing—kissing. So, I do get jealous sometimes—I’m trying to be not so jealous now. But I have friends who are in relationships and have threesomes or have open relationships. There’s some people who can do that and some who can’t because they just get too jealous. I’ve always found it really interesting—I guess the mystery of your partner being with someone else creates a jealousy that can keep things new and interesting. I don’t know if I’ll get to that point just yet.

Are there any photos from the book with a wild story behind it? Tell me about the lead image—the one with the two guys kissing that you took.

That was a fun night. That’s my ex-boyfriend and one of my best friends. The three of us, and also with my roommate, would get together and just like, go crazy. On this night, everyone was just kissing everyone. We were playing truth or dare, people were spitting tequila into each other’s mouths—at one point we all kissed every other person. It’s just fun!

Kissing can be way fun if you do it some place you’re not supposed to be doing it. Have you ever kissed somewhere that's like, ‘I should not be making out here but I am doing it anyway.’

I don’t know if there's anywhere you’re truly not supposed to make out. I mean, I like having sex on roofs. I have a couple times and it’s just fun—you’re like, ‘Someone could totally see us, but probably not. Still, they might be watching.’

What’s next for you? Will there ever be a Kiss Me 2?

I’ve mostly been working on music, so it’s a very different endeavor than this. I play in a band and I have another band with some friends. But maybe there could be a sequel. I feel like it would need to have another component to make it different. But there could be!

Steel Nudes

November 19, 2018

I met Nick Moss on a flawless fall day: the leaves seemed to change before our very eyes, the impossibly abundant trees that surrounded his ridiculously chic house atop a hill in upstate New York rolled out into the distance in shades of yellow, red and orange like a Bob Ross landscape—a classic panorama that felt exactly like the delicious slice of Americana that it was.

The setting seems apt for the welder-cum-entrepreneur-cum-artist: he is a handsome, unassuming man from Michigan enamored with steel as a material and its unexplored artistic possibilities. It’s a material that is difficult to master and control and whose associations are mechanical and somewhat ferocious—it recalls precision, man’s dominance over nature and the dawn of modern weaponry, but also of post-Industrial America, the Midwest and high school shop class. Vast sheets of shimmering gray steel serve as Moss’s canvases, where he has chosen to tackle both the oldest and newest of artistic tropes: the emoji and the female nude.

At his new solo show, Rigorous Perception at the Leila Heller Gallery in Chelsea, other pieces are entirely abstract, where swirling vortexes of marbleized color are formed through different patinas applied to the steel’s surface. The show is like the bookends of art history: on one end, the classically figurative; on the other, the abstract, unified by their rendering in this most permanent of mediums.

The nudes are drawn with a welding tool, normally used to fuse metals together and which leaves a melted scar in the process. Here the scars form female figures, the fusion that of image to surface, these simple drawings rendered in a level of permanence reminiscent of ancient monuments built to last the ages. These nudes are like goddesses of yore caught in a myth for the future—one can’t help but picture them in a very distant time, a leftover of our species as evidence that we existed, once.

In order to accomplish these pictures, the artist explained with boyish enthusiasm to the small gaggle of New York art press gathered in his studio—an outbuilding that was part welder’s garage, part man cave-turned-artist’s lounge (with a sparkling new motorcycle displayed with sculptural flair as centerpiece)—he has to weld the steel canvas to the table itself. After offering to separate the picture from the table several times, it became clear that he was itching to do so. We all stood at a safe distance as he popped on his welding helmet and ignited the welder, making short order of his work: the picture lifted off the table because it had become warped—getting it flat again is a whole other process.

After he led us to the house, a breathtaking lodge decorated to magazine perfection in mid-century modern pieces in homey shades of ecru and brown, where his beguiling girlfriend (who served as a model for some of Moss’s figures, and it wasn’t hard to see why) served shrimp and grits as discussions proliferated about the artist’s earlier work—those larger-than-life iPhone emojis rendered in, of course, steel—and what the aliens that discover them will think of our era. The answer? Who knows.

“The walls are opposite of each other,” he said in his clipped German accent. He was referring to the two black-and-white pieces that are negatives of one another which cap the two potential entrances (or exits) of the gallery. Like the black and white tokens of a chess set that form a coherent aesthetic—along with the complex, potentially infinite movements that lie therein—the show is a calculated game of balancing positive and negative, material and image, inspiration and execution.

“Why chess?” I asked as we re-entered the gallery. “It’s my passion,” he responded immediately. Included in the show is a giant black pawn made of records, as well as a wall of vintage chess pieces in the gallery’s bookstore, an aggregate piece titled ‘Pawn Shop.’

It wasn’t until later, when I sat down to write about the show, that I realized the implications of the chess pieces—the show is very much like a game of chess: grids everywhere, hidden motions and movements, and a precise guiding of the viewer along as if through a carefully orchestrated series of moves. Whether this game ends in checkmate or is one that continues throughout the artist’s career is an open question.

With a combination of youthful eagerness and professorial earnestness, Hildebrandt led me through the show, piece by piece, explaining each with a kind of awe that they actually hung before him. His signature materials are all remnants of bygone recording devices: audio cassette and VHS tape are used as canvas, the recordings beneath, paradoxically, are sometimes recordings of the artist making the piece at hand, sometimes musicians he was listening to when making the piece, or an Orson Welles film—but you’d never know.

A corny Pinterest craft project—the vintage music record melted and made into a bowl—becomes, through Hildebrandt’s hand, exaggerated into forming walls that guide the viewer through the gallery, and a “Babylonian tower” that is eighteen meters high and which projects through all three floors of the gallery and into the basement, visible through a grate. It’s a visual marvel that occurs throughout the show and leaves an unanswerable curiosity: what do those many hours of recording hold? What music echoes behind the pieces’ monumental silence?

Above: 'Kleines Feld' and 'weiße Bewegungn (zu PAAR),' 2018.

In the first inner chamber lies a photograph of a woman in yellow dancing, the picture broken up across a wall-size grid of cassette tape cases. “I loved it so much,” Hildebrandt said. “She gives you the movement that you have to come in. I call it ‘Follow the Yellow.’”

In the largest section at the heart of the show is a giant painting that runs across miles of cassette tape that is built into the walls of the gallery like a curtain, the painting running in gigantic strokes that dip into a negative—becoming, all of a sudden, not only set back into the wall, but black becomes white, white becomes black, then the same paint stroke flows out and returns to its original, positive iteration, leaving the viewer to wonder which is the positive and which the negative. This monumental piece was done in a single session while a friend played live music and Sonya, the woman in yellow, danced. On top of music and film being hidden in the materials of his work, he has taken it one step further: he’s embedded a live performance with no audience.

It’s Abstract Expressionism with a soundtrack—the opening pieces he pointed out in the beginning are made on cassette recordings of a band Hildebrandt collaborated with for this show, a Munich-based group called, simply, PAAR. The bold, painterly gestures are direct references to the group’s music, just as the gigantic room-size piece is reference to the live music that played as he made it. One music is inaccessible, a performance that only exists in the memory of those who saw it, and the other is available in the bookstore: the PAAR record, pre-warped, is available on the way in (or out).

Nightmare Hack

November 17, 2018

The psychological reality of a sex worker is not an easy thing to portray on-screen. Even more difficult is accomplishing that goal without condoning a moralistic view on sex work, or pandering to the male gaze. And while Hollywood in the era of #MeToo is slowly evolving, even the filmmakers in favor of change have to consciously battle a point of view that’s been perpetuated since the beginning of cinema.

In CAM, a psychological thriller that delves into the world of camgirl Alice, whose cam-identity (Lola) gets hacked and stolen, screenwriter Isa Mazzei and director Daniel Goldhaber manage to bring their audience into a sex worker’s crisis in a way that creates space for empathy, rather than judgment. This is the duo’s first feature-length film, but as creative collaborators, they were well prepared. Their longtime friendship and varying fields of expertise and experience enabled Goldhaber and Mazzei to teach one another throughout every stage of production.

With the objective of telling the story strictly from Alice’s perspective, they eliminated shots that, while perfectly framed from a filmmaker’s perspective, fed a male-gaze narrative. Mazzei was able to point those moments out because she didn’t study film. She’s studied in the movie’s central topic, though—she used to work as a camgirl, and saw the shows she put on as her art.

So, Alice, naturally, is derived in part from those experiences. But the core issues of the film aren’t limited to the scope of camming—they’re relatable for anyone with any sort of curated online identity, be it on Instagram or Twitter. We’re all vulnerable to being hacked and losing access to a digital part of ourselves, an eventuality that becomes more and more dire as we become more and more addicted to our screens.

Isa Mazzei: I studied literature at UC Berkeley and wrote a lot, and I studied futurism and the avant-garde. So, when we started talking about doing a film together, I brought a lot of my literature background. And Danny—he went to film school—so he brought this cinema aesthetic and idea to it. We built the story from the ground up together—when we say it’s a film by us, it’s a film by us. Everything we did together.

We’d have these long conversations about story or about my experiences camming and what we wanted to bring into the movie and then I’d go and bust out some pages, and then we’d talk about them. We had this nice collaborative process from the beginning that let us build this trust with each other that we then took onto set.

Why did you decide to go with horror as a genre for a movie about a sex work story?

Daniel Goldhaber: Originally, we were thinking of doing a documentary on Isa when she was camming and ultimately ended up feeling that pornography and documentary have a very similar contract with the audience—and that contract is like, voyeuristic, ‘I’m giving you reality.’ And docs are not real. They’re still crafted and there’s still a point of view. Documentaries are very hard to make about someone’s psychological reality. And that was very important in this—really bringing an audience into a camgirl and a sex worker’s psychological reality.

So, we quickly abandoned that, and came up with this opening scene and realized there’s a surreal psychological thriller in here. But when you’re thinking, ‘How do I build familiarity between an audience and a sex worker?’ Genre is a great way to do that because genre is familiar. So, when you take ideas like those in CAM that are subversive and fresh, both when it comes to sex work, but also when it comes to the portrayal of technology and you bake those into genre structure, you allow an audience to feel familiar with them.

How did you keep your story intact when switching from the idea of filming a documentary to horror?

Daniel Goldhaber: We had a manifesto very early on with our non-negotiable rules and ideas for the film. Our number one rule was that the audience has to be empathizing with the sex worker and the negative stakes of the movie can’t be derived from her decision to be a sex worker. So, if you think about it, the horror twist of the movie is a sex worker’s loss of agency over her own body. And that only works if the audience realizes that she did have agency over her body in the first 25 minutes of the film. So, that’s where the stakes come from, even if it happens retroactively.

So you guys considered doing this as a documentary at first and Isa, you have a memoir coming out next year that has to do with camming. When you were working as a camgirl, were you aware of how much creative work it would later lead to?

Isa Mazzei: When I was camming, camming was the creative work. My cam shows were my creative outlet, my art. All this creative energy that I’ve always had my whole life that I put into different places—be they my bad novels, or in this case, my camming—that was the work I was really proud of. That was where I was getting my creative validation and my self-expression. So, when I started writing the movie, it felt really natural to put those creative energies into a new medium and see where that took me. I’m really excited that it opened this door to making movies with badass female leads.

Were your shows similar to Alice’s where she’s doing these very theatrical, themed shows?

Isa Mazzei: Some of them, yeah. Some of them were just straight porn shows, and some were more experimental. Just like Alice, I was very studied in my shows and I tried different things and saw what worked, saw what audiences engaged with and did more of that. So, I did many different types of shows—some very creative and crazy and some I would be just masturbating or playing Jenga. It kind of ran the gamut.

I know averting the male gaze was important to you both, so I’m curious in making the film—in staging it and in writing it—how did you avert the male gaze?

Daniel Goldhaber: It was a process from the first moment to the last moment of working on the film. Even when it comes to the authorship credit, this is a film by me and Isa. We frequently think of authorship in film as a monologue from a single, predominantly male person. In this film, we really wanted the film from an authorship standpoint to be a dialogue. And a dialogue can be I’m a man and Isa is a woman.

In many ways, my impetus for getting involved with the project on a personal level was that it came at a time when I was reckoning with an unhealthy relationship I had with the women in my life and the way I had been socialized to behave around them. I wanted to re-educate myself. And this film and working with Isa was an opportunity for me to learn from her, and I’m very thankful for her patience in that capacity.

Isa Mazzei: Also, in thinking about stripping the male gaze from a film, we’re dealing with this legacy of cinema that objectifies women. It’s been a male-dominated industry since its creation. So, we had to be very deliberate in every moment to recognize when standards of filmmaking were catering to the male gaze, sometimes unintentionally.

What scenes in particular do you think create an opportunity for a man to learn about relating to a woman and her sexuality differently?

Daniel Goldhaber: In many ways, the Vibratron scene is one of the best examples of that, and the loss of agency. If there’s a third, it’s the craft that goes into not only sex work, but performed gender in general, performed sexuality. We really treat the performed gender that we encounter of both male and female as a given in our society and it’s one of the more toxic components of our gender paradigm.

How does Barney, the male character with a lot of toxic masculine energy, fit into that?

Isa Mazzei: Barney is really a stand-in for male entitlement over the female body within the patriarchy. Men feel entitled to female bodies, especially with sex workers. Often men decide that if they pay you for one thing, they’re entitled to everything. And that’s absolutely not the case. Sex workers have boundaries, rules and prices that need to be respected. Initially, he doesn’t come off as a bad guy, just a big-shot tipper. And then there’s this shift all of a sudden where we realize he thinks he owns women because of his wealth, power and status. The #MeToo movement is so indicative of these paradigms we’re living in.

Is this sort of identity theft something that cammers really have to worry about in their industry?

Isa Mazzei: I think anyone who engages with the internet has to deal with the threat of identity theft. On a more literal side, Lola is the embodiment of some experiences I had as a camgirl, but also of what a lot of us have had with curated digital identities. We all put a fake version of ourselves online. We all have a digital persona that we’ve built for ourself. No matter how real we want them to be, they’re still, by definition, curated. So, there’s always a paranoia when you’re getting validation from online platforms, ‘Do my friends actually like me? Do they just like this digital persona I’ve created? Where do I stop and where does this digital identity start?’

Another real experience for me was having my work pirated, screen-captured and posted all over the internet often without my name on it. I’d see myself on a porn site naked and it would say, ‘Frizzy-haired pale girl does X,’ and I’m looking at it and it’s in no way tied to me anymore. And it was really a disembodying, alienating experience to look at myself, but myself was no longer tied to me in any way. That experience, and feeling that kind of violation and alienation from myself and my own digital persona was absolutely something I drew on to create Lola.